Ageless: Akerman's Avatars

Chantal Akerman was 18 when she made her first film, Saute ma ville (1968). In it, her young body sings loudly and tunelessly, while she eats pasta, covers her shoes, socks, and legs in thick black boot polish, floods the kitchen in her small Brussels apartment and finally turns on the gas hob before laying her head on it to wait for the inevitable explosion. In her last film, No Home Movie (2015), Akerman’s camera returns to another small Brussels apartment, to quiet domesticity, and to an intimate portrait of her elderly mother, Nelly. Despite the incredible diversity and plasticity of Akerman’s films, on cinema screens and in multi-channel installation, there is also a timeless circularity in the themes of her work. Everything begins and ends with a small Brussels apartment, with the delicate and robust lives of mothers and daughters. In the course of Akerman’s films, grown-up daughters later re-emerge as mothers of adult children, (Lea Massari and Aurore Clément in Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), Clément and Sylvie Testud in Demain on deménage (2004)). And yet Akerman’s intergenerational avatar, the daughter, who features in so many forms in so many of her films, remains forever young, interchangeable, stubbornly resistant to being categorised as a singular ‘woman’. This essay sketches out a portrait of this strange presence, who takes the many forms of a young woman, with her insuppressable links to Akerman herself: an “Ageless Akerman”. This vision of intergenerational cinematic agency speaks to the enduring legacy of resistant femininity: one that remains, and will remain, long after Akerman’s own exit from the world in 2015